Last week the U.S. Census Bureau and Bloomberg announced that the number of vacant properties has shrunk to its lowest level since 2006. Great news for real estate investing but there are still real challenges to be addressed.
A declining number of vacant properties isn’t just good news for home builders, it signals a rise in demand and brings the expectation that less inventory means being able to flip houses faster and rent them quickly too.
However, demand is clearly no longer a major issue. Everyone from those fresh out of college and eager to get out of mom’s basement to those who lost homes at the beginning of the crisis to foreign investors want to buy homes. They don’t want to wait until home prices and rates go up either. Unfortunately the biggest challenge remains enabling more people to buy and for investors, maintaining liquidity.
There are mountains of cash out there for buying real estate right now it just isn’t in the hands of the banks. This will not doubt continue to flow for a couple of years, especially as more flight capital heads to the U.S.
Real estate investing pros can focus on attracting and exclusively marketing to cash buyers and with the right strategy can do very well, even though there is a lot of competition for this money.
However, in order to really make sure the recovery takes hold and continues to blossom real estate investors do need to be proactive and innovative in pioneering new ways to enable more home buyers to buy or at a minimum to create more liquidity for buy and hold investors and to rapidly get renters on the fast track to homeownership.
This is a moment when creativity and developing new solutions to meet this need can turn resourceful, forward thinking real estate investors into the next generation of Forbes richest list members.
